Sharing the Christian metaphysics of Xavier Zubiri and the fullness of Western Tradition under the patronage of St. Cyril of Alexandria and St. Bonaventure. Except as otherwise noted, copyright for all blog entries is held by Jonathan Prejean 2004-2013; all rights reserved.

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Well, I think it's about time I catch up on my reading

Look at the wonderful quotations that have come out of Christian discussion on GregK's board:
"It will be a cold day in hell when I profit from anything you have to say."

"I'd rather be skinned alive layer by layer than to be helped by you."

And this was all from one Reformed pastor! The sad thing is that while the comments are completely unjustifiable, I can actually understand why he was irritated, what with his faith being called demon worship and all. It's one thing if you think a Christian has a defective conception of God; it's another thing entirely to say that they are worshipping a different God. Why discuss a meaningless hypothetical about what God would be like if their beliefs were accurate if you sincerely believe that they are not accurate? What good does it do to provoke a fellow Christian to this point, whether you are right or not?

Anyway, it seems overall like the dialogues in which I have been involved lately are shedding more light than heat, so I think I'm going to devote some time to reading some books that have come highly recommended, and posting my thoughts on them. I'm hoping that cooler heads will prevail in any dialogue, since we'll be dealing with more scholarly works. Quite honestly, arguments that don't appeal to such works seem to be miserable failures, and even the ones that do (like Dave Armstrong's and Tim Enloe's) don't get read as such, because people get too caught up in polemics. If nothing else, it will be an opportunity to give some electronic ink to some books that probably deserve more than they've received to date.

So anyway, that's my plan. We'll see if this proves any more constructive than the current Internet climate.